Frida Kahlo Trivia
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49 free Frida Kahlo trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Frida Kahlo trivia quiz covers the life behind the self-portraits. It begins in Coyoacán with a German-born photographer father, the polio that shortened her leg, the elite preparatory school where she was one of 35 girls among 2,000 students, and the streetcar collision that ended her plans to be a doctor and started her painting from a bed with a mirror above it. From there it follows the marriage her parents called 'an elephant and a dove', the years in San Francisco, Detroit and New York, the retablo-style paintings of pain and miscarriage, André Breton's 'ribbon around a bomb', the New York show attended by Georgia O'Keeffe, the Paris disaster and the Louvre purchase, Trotsky's stay at La Casa Azul and their affair, the divorce and remarriage, the 28 corsets, the amputation, the opening night she attended in her four-poster bed, and the death that may not have been what the certificate said. It ends with Fridamania: the export ban, the 500-peso note, Salma Hayek, Coco and the 2025 auction record. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, then a village on the outskirts of where?
Mexico City
Mexico City has long since absorbed Coyoacán, and the family house where she grew up and died is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.
Q 02Kahlo's father Guillermo, who emigrated from Germany in 1891, worked as what?
A photographer
A photographer of buildings by trade, he taught Frida to retouch and colour his prints, and she often helped out in his studio.
Q 03Which British band named a 2008 album after words Kahlo painted on a still life of watermelons?
Coldplay
Coldplay called it Viva la Vida: singer Chris Martin saw the phrase, which means 'long live life', on her painting and loved its boldness from an artist who had been through so much.
Q 04Which illness at age six left Kahlo's right leg shorter and thinner than her left?
Polio
Polio left her with a limp, so her father urged her into soccer, swimming and wrestling, sports thought unsuitable for girls at the time.
Q 05Before her accident, Kahlo studied natural sciences at the National Preparatory School, aiming for which career?
Doctor
Doctor was the plan: she was one of just 35 girls among 2,000 students, and the bus crash at 18 ended her hopes of medical school.
Q 06Why did Kahlo claim to have been born in 1910 rather than 1907?
To match the Mexican Revolution
To match the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, she shaved three years off her age and called herself a daughter of the revolution.
Q 07On 17 September 1925, Kahlo's bus was hit by what?
An electric streetcar
An electric streetcar rammed the bus as she rode home from school, killing several passengers; Kahlo, then 18, spent months recovering in bed.
Q 08In the accident, Kahlo was impaled through the pelvis by what?
An iron handrail
An iron handrail broke off and went through her pelvis; her spine was fractured in three places, and doctors doubted she would survive.
Q 09How did Kahlo's mother help her paint while confined to bed after the accident?
She had a special easel built
She had a special easel built so Frida could paint lying down, and a mirror fixed overhead turned the patient into her own model.
Q 10Kahlo said she painted herself because she was so often alone and because she was what?
The subject she knew best
The subject she knew best: bedridden after the crash, she painted from a mirror fixed over her bed, and about a third of her paintings are self-portraits.
Q 11Kahlo first met Diego Rivera briefly in 1922 while he was doing what?
Painting a mural at her school
They were reintroduced at a Tina Modotti party in 1928, when she asked him to judge whether her paintings had talent.
Q 12Kahlo's parents described her marriage to Rivera as a union between what?
An elephant and a dove
An elephant and a dove caught the contrast in size: Rivera was tall and heavy, Kahlo slight, and her 1931 portrait based on their wedding photograph plays it up.
Q 13Kahlo's favoured traditional dress came from the women of which region, reputed to be matriarchal?
Q 21Kahlo had an affair of her own in 1935 with which sculptor?
Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi was in Mexico making a relief mural for a public market; the affair was brief, but the two stayed friends until her death.
Q 22Which exiled revolutionary lived in Kahlo's family home from January 1937 to April 1939?
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky won asylum in Mexico with the couple's help; he and Kahlo had a brief affair, and she gave him a full-length self-portrait dedicated to him.
Q 23Why did police hold Kahlo for two days in August 1940?
They suspected her in a murder
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec gave her the Tehuana look of embroidered blouses and long skirts, which she wore in Paris and New York just as she did at home.
Q 14Kahlo's 1931 painting of horticulturist Luther Burbank depicted him as what?
A hybrid of human and plant
A hybrid of human and plant: his legs become a trunk whose roots feed on a corpse, and the real Burbank had been buried under a tree at his California home in 1926.
Q 15In a 1933 Detroit newspaper interview, Kahlo joked what about herself and Rivera?
That she was the greater artist
That she was the greater artist came with a grin: 'Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.'
Q 16Kahlo's Detroit works such as Henry Ford Hospital adopted the format of what?
Retablos, small votive images on metal
Retablos, small votive images on metal, thank a saint for surviving a calamity; she and Rivera collected them, and she borrowed the format for her own disasters.
Q 17How did a 1933 Detroit News headline describe Kahlo's own painting?
'Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art'
'Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art' ended a headline that began 'Wife of the Master Mural Painter', yet the article beneath it, by Florence Davies, praised her style as skilful and beautiful.
Q 18Rivera was fired in 1933 from a mural commission at which New York landmark?
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center's owners dismissed him after he painted Lenin into the mural and refused to remove him; with Kahlo homesick, the couple went back to Mexico at the end of 1933.
Q 19Kahlo and Rivera's San Ángel house, designed by Juan O'Gorman, was two sections joined by what?
A bridge
A bridge, a narrow one, linked her blue house to his, and the pair of homes became a gathering place for artists and political activists.
Q 20Rivera's affair with which family member drove Kahlo out of the house in 1935?
Her younger sister Cristina
Her younger sister Cristina was the affair she could not shrug off: Frida moved out to a flat of her own, but within months she was reconciled with Rivera and back at San Ángel.
They suspected her in a murder committed in Coyoacán that month; her health was already failing, and in September she went to San Francisco for medical treatment.
Q 24Who made Kahlo's first significant sale in summer 1938, buying four paintings at $200 each?
Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson, the Hollywood star and collector, stunned her with the sale: she wrote that now she could be free, able to travel and do what she wanted without asking Diego for money.
Q 25How did André Breton describe Kahlo's work when he met her in 1938?
'A ribbon around a bomb'
'A ribbon around a bomb' was his phrase for her art; she later wrote that she never knew she was a Surrealist until Breton came to Mexico and told her she was one.
Q 26Which American painter attended the opening of Kahlo's first solo exhibition in New York in 1938?
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe came to the opening at Julien Levy's Manhattan gallery, and about half of the 25 paintings sold despite the Depression.
Q 27What did Kahlo paint when Clare Boothe Luce commissioned a memorial portrait of a late friend?
Her fatal fall
Her fatal fall, shown in stages from a high window to the pavement, horrified Luce, who had wanted a keepsake for Dorothy Hale's mother and considered destroying the picture.
Q 28In Paris in 1939, which artist got Kahlo her exhibition after André Breton had failed to arrange it?
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was, she wrote to a friend, 'the only one who has his feet on the earth' among 'this bunch of coocoo lunatic' Surrealists.
Q 29Which museum bought Kahlo's self-portrait The Frame, its first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist?
The Louvre
The Louvre bought it in 1939 from the Paris exhibition Mexique, which was otherwise not a financial success.
Q 30Which fashion designer created a dress inspired by Kahlo during her 1939 Paris visit?
Elsa Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli called it La Robe Madame Rivera, after the traditional Mexican dresses Kahlo wore in Paris; Kahlo herself came home scornful of the city's Surrealists.